A.I.R. Artist in Residence. Collegiate

This year I was a recipient of an A.I.R grant through Arts Tasmania to be a composer in residence at the St. Michaels Collegiate school in Hobart.

The brief: to be a role model for senior students in the creative industries and to create a new body of work through this process.

It began with:

Well, having never done a residency before, I was delighted at the idea and utterly terrified at the ides of being a funded role model who had to come up with something in order to inspire. As I took my study space, set up my gear, attended classes and walked the grounds, I was searching for inspiration. I searched for sometime. Then a few weeks in, I panicked. I had very little to show for my efforts. Why? It turns out that I’d been teaching a principle foe years that in this instance I had failed to adhere to myself. Limitation. Limit your creative area, in order to free yourself. There’s nothing scarier than the open book, the limitless sky, the boundless plains, the world’s your oyster so to speak. With anything possible, nothing was.

I was reminded of the Quartet for the End of Time by Messiaen. Here was a work written by a french composer in a concentration camp in WW2. He was recognised as a composer of note and allowed to write for the instruments that were available to him in the camp. Piano, Cello, Clarinet and Violin. If you’re looking for limitations, WW2 POW has got it covered! Messiaen was limited and in the process, knew what he had to work with, and so he punched the boundaries of his possibilities. Without walls, how is boundary pushing even possible?

So, I went back to basics. What instruments do I have, what is my course and why? It turns out that when you lock it down to a string quartet, things become easier. Not just because a quartet is amazing, but the boundaries make the possibilities almost endless. Also, whilst walking the school library and perusing the bookshelves of music and art, (music and art are always side by side in a school library), I happened upon a book that took my notice because of where I had recently journeyed from. A book on post WW2 Parisian Art became my favoured read.

Oh Sting

Sometimes ,missing a deadline works to ones advantage. I’m not suggesting this as a business strategy, but sometimes, as in this particular time, something good came of it. I was so busy with the NW project, that when an email loaded with a poem from David Walsh, issuing the challenge to set it to music came, I quarantined it, knowing that it would become the greatest of marvellous distractions from all other work. I left it for a few weeks. This, apparently, is far too long for a poet who’s muse was restless for music upon his verse. So I was both disappointed and delighted when informed that, due to my lack of activity in this area, the poem had been sent to Sting to muse upon.

In the following blog, David writes that I dismissed said poem. See above my defence. See blow the blog. Being one point of a triangle of David Walsh, Sting and myself is a pleasant place to be. Sentimentally, I rejoice.

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